Five Fitness Profiles

Fitness Profile Details and Prerequisites:

Which level best describes your experience and ability? 

What are the prerequisites for a BC program at your fitness level?

Fitness Level One:  Transitioner/Novice Athlete

Profile.  Transitioners are in transit from being unfit and unhealthy to something approaching rudimentary fitness and a healthier lifestyle.  Let’s call them “novice” athletes, knowing that being an “athlete” is still beyond the transitioner’s comprehension. 

  • Are you someone who rarely gets outdoors to exercise?
  • Is your Me-Time spent in sedentary mode (TV and snacking)?
  • Will you need social support to develop new exercise habits?
  • Do you find it difficult to imagine enjoying a fitness regimen?
  • Do you work long hours that afford you little time and energy for exercise? 
  • Are you often too tired and depressed after work to consider exercise?
  • Is your social life characterized by harmful eating/nutritional habits?
  • Do you find excuses to stop an exercise regimen at the first possible moment?
  • Are you discouraged and shamed by your limited physical ability? 

Prerequisites.  As a Transitioner, you are attempting a fundamental trans-formation from non-athlete to novice athlete, where being “athletic” is an emerging awareness that fitness exercise can be pleasant, rewarding, and fun.  Prerequisites attitudes include:

  • Develop a loving, nurturing, and respectful relationship with your body.  Being infirmed and unable to perform is not your body’s fault; you have made it that way with years of dissolute behavior.  You must commit to giving your body what it wants and needs.
  • Becoming a novice athlete also means accepting your scary health and fitness circum-stances.  You should at least be willing to reverse years of sedentary living by starting exercise with non-injurious levels of exertion for short bouts several times a week.

As important as your work and family are, you will be relatively ineffectual without first taking care of your physical fitness: body composition, flexibility, strength, and stamina.  You must balance passive sedentary Me-Time with active exercise Me-Time.

Fitness Level Two:  Launcher/Beginner Athlete.

Profile.  Launchers past the age of 30-40 are on a downward fitness slide.  A dearth of exercise has put them on the brink of chronic illness.  Yet their aversion to exertion, along with time and energy considerations, can easily preclude commitment to a regular exercise regimen.

  • Do you have little or no recent fitness exercise background? 
  • Would you call yourself a beginner athlete (walker/jogger)? 
  • Are you afraid of being too slow or not fast enough to keep up?
  • Are you okay with walking slowly for 15-20 minutes several times a week?
  • Is the prospect of exercising beyond thirty minutes daunting?
  • Do you suffer from insomnia, lack of energy, muscle pain and stiffness?
  • Are you skeptical of your potential to develop significant fitness? 
  • Are you afraid you can’t adopt the discipline of recreational athleticism?

Prerequisites.  Launching fitness activity from scratch requires attention to several basic factors until they are accepted as normal and necessary.  It would be difficult to succeed in this program without careful consideration of the following from the outset.

  • Reconfirming priorities so one manages to train several times a week, as well as eating sensibly for the sake of your personal health and fitness.
  • Nurturing a sense of empowerment that evolves when exerting oneself deliberately and non-injuriously for the sake of personal health and fitness. 
  • Creating an enjoyable and sustainable fitness exercise routine so one looks forward to all aspects of the workout activity—before, during, and after.

Nurturing a visceral sense of being individually fit, with others.  Even the experience of the most individually motivated can be enhanced in a group.

Fitness Level Three:  Practitioner/Intermediate Athlete

Profile.  As beginners-becoming-intermediate athletes, practitioners need support to take on the discipline of regular fitness training for the sake of nascent competitive goals.

  • Do you train in a catch-as-catch-can basis, at odd hours?
  • Do you usually feel that your workouts are too short, rushed, or compressed?
  • Are you bothered by frequent, nagging injuries you must train through?
  • Do you train three times a week sometimes, but often only once or twice?
  • Do you believe in a no-pain, no-gain approach to fitness training?
  • Do you wish you had time for stretching or strengthening, but can seldom find it?
  • Is regular training relegated to a low-priority item compared to work and family?

Prerequisites.  Practitioners will practice the skills and habits necessary to become full-fledged intermediate athletes.  This will be an arduous road to follow, including the following prerequisite commitments.

  • A commitment to the discipline of regular training: workouts in scheduled time slots, with rational and non-injurious ability-building exertion structures.
  • A determined focus during workouts to practice running skills, from the rudimentary to the advanced, until they become habitual.
  • A commitment to recognizing, reducing, and ultimately eliminating pain during the fitness training and racing processes.  The new mantra is no pain brings gain.
  • The realization that training can be shared in a support group that shows up regularly and enjoys the fitness training process in one another’s company.

Fitness Level Four:  Advanced Racers.

Profile.  Advanced racers want to do a specific race, but they aren’t clear about how to train for it effectively.  Their training is fraught with pitfalls based on limited experience, incorrect ideas, and haphazard planning, all of which prevents them from becoming fully racing fit. 

Are you sometimes in a quandary about how to answer the following perennial training questions?

  • How can I structure the exertion of my workouts to build my racing ability?  Mild, light, steady state, threshold, ragged-edge, and maximum?
  • How hard should I train to optimize my workout efforts?  Very easy, easy, moderate, hard, very hard, all-out?
  • How long should my workouts be (in minutes)? 
  • How many times a week should I train? 
  • How do I know when I’m adequately recovered?
  • What role does fatigue play in the training process?
  • How can I get rid of chronic injury.
  • How can I have my best energy for every race? 

Advanced racers are interested in the way the hard-easy system answers these questions.  As such, their racing goals are a work in progress, as the more they learn about the training process, the more their goals evolve, along with the means to achieve them. 

Prerequisites.  Advanced athletes are becoming racing fit—a transformation from mere practitioner to advanced competitive racer.  It helps to already possess a predisposition to becoming more competitive.  The pathway there challenges like a part-time job. 

  • It helps to focus on doing certain race events while practicing the means to develop a full complement of racing abilities for them. 
  • It helps to start at a modest workout effort level for the sake of gradually and incrementally approaching a harder and more optimal level. 
  • It helps to have the time to train on a strict timetable, with three major workouts scheduled in regular weekly time slots, and with 2 or 3 recovery runs in between. 
  • It helps to review and practice the skills of running, already made habitual at the Practitioner level, where basic skills are a major and constant training focus.

Level 5: Master Racer

Profile.  Masters are not necessarily above a certain age; rather, they are in the process of becoming experts in their field.  A master racer could be a teacher or a coach because he/she has made a study of the game.  Masters know the training process from vast experience.

  • And yet, even masters have more to learn.  Though they know, for instance, about training periods and training cycles, they have not yet been able to train progressively from year to year.  Something invariably comes up to prevent a truly best performance.
  • And they may know how to train hard several times a week, yet they have trouble recovering regularly and adequately for months without injury, illness, or exhaustion.  Supremely competitive by nature, they haven’t mastered their deepest natural self.
  • For knowing how to train is not the same as training well.  In translating knowledge into action, one must play at the training process, which really means playing harmoniously with one’s physical nature.  Finding fun and satisfaction in the flow of it.

Prerequisites.  A master racer must be humble enough to accept coaching advice and counsel.  At the master level, the air of knowledge is rarified.  A master looks in vain to find a more knowledgeable mind.  No one knows it all, but some know enough to point at pathways.

  • A master must look to regular meditation as a means of adjusting on the fly to a rapidly changing physical, mental, and spiritual landscape.  There is nothing magical about meditation.  It’s just a matter of taking the time to sit relaxed and comfortable in silence.
  • One must abide in the knowledge that inspiration comes to those who attend to themselves at the deepest level.  Not so much to the thoughts that come, but to the space between thoughts where pure awareness resides. 
  • We are thrown to follow our thinking, rather than our intuition; our mind, rather than our heart; our ego-self, rather than our sensing, feeling body.  So, there’s meditation practice, and there’s actual practice in the real world.  Mastery resides in both.

Sign Up for the new BCET Fitness Programs

Knowing who you are as an athlete, please do the Pre-Program Questionnaire so your coaches or the program organizers can learn more about you.

Frequently Asked Questions

  •  Do I have to be "in shape" to join?

There are five fitness levels from the transitioners who haven't exercised in ages to master racers who are on top of their fitness game.  You'll fit in somewhere.  And when you find your group, you'll be with others at the same fitness level with similar fitness needs and goals.

  • Should I consult my doctor before starting?

Yes, especially if you are already under a doctor's care for any chronic health issue.  The main thing, however, is to do nothing that will cause you pain or discomfort, nothing that isn't enjoyable and sustainable.  It's the staff's job to teach you how to train safely and effectively during workouts using the hard-easy system.  It's your job to attend three workouts a week and practice what the facilitator instructs you to do.

  • If I don't see result after 6 weeks can I get my money back?

Your so generous to give yourself six weeks.  :>}  We will ask you to decide what fitness parameters you wish to track when you log your workouts.  We want to know if you're getting injured; you may want to know whether you are getting up a certain flight of stairs with greater ease.  You'll see significant improvement in 6 weeks or you can have your money back.

  • What is included in the registration fee?

The fee enables you to participate in three live workouts per week for the duration of the program.  If you miss a live workout, you may listen to the recording during a "make-up" workout on your own.

You'll track your workouts using our workout log.  And we will give you regular information updates on your progress.  We will also recognize your fitness achievements on the acknowledgements page of our website.

Moreover, we will reward you for your achievements with valuable Wisdom Topics on a wide range of fitness related topics.  Most important is the ability to connect with others who can support you in becoming fit for life.

Our program is set up to give you safety in the age of pandemic.  You can train confidently in a group that's connected by cell phone, but without being threatened with close proximity to others.

 

  • Do I need any special equipment?

Good running or walking shoes are a must have.  Here is a link to a primer on getting shoes.

A blue tooth enabled cell phone to participate in live workouts.  Ear buds that connect to your cell phone are okay, too.

A bright flashlight for walking in the dark.

A fanny pack for carrying stuff.

Warm clothes you can layer if the weather turns blustery.  And a hat.

 

  • How do I protect myself from attack in dark neighborhoods?

The best protection against attack is a partner who trains at your pace.  Find places with lots of people and scan ahead and around you for potential issues.  Avoid issues by choosing to walk the other way.  Take a loud whistle and scream bloody murder if necessary to draw attention to your situation.  Find quiet/safe neighborhoods where there are people around indoors, and hardly anyone on the road with you.  Walk in the middle of a quiet street or road where you have space from others on the sidewalk.  

Start Your Lifetime Health and Fitness Transformation.

Click the "Get Started" button and tell us about your fitness goals and interests.  You will be added to our user list with access to the BC Endurance members-only website.